Key Points
- President Donald Trump plans to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to revive his defamation lawsuit against CNN, according to a legal filing.
- Trump’s lawsuit seeks $475 million, alleging CNN defamed him by using the term “Big Lie” in election coverage.
- Several lower courts have blocked Trump’s efforts to sue CNN thus far, saying the complaint did not meet the necessary legal standards to allege defamation against the news organization.
President Donald Trump plans to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to revive his defamation lawsuit against CNN, nearly three years after the case was dismissed by a federal judge.
The move was disclosed in a filing submitted to the Supreme Court seeking a 60-day extension to file a petition for review. Trump’s attorneys asked the justices to extend the filing deadline until August 15, indicating they intend to challenge lower court rulings that rejected the lawsuit.
Bloomberg was the first to report on the filing. CNN has not publicly commented on the possibility of a continued legal fight involving the president.
Trump originally sued the news channel in 2022, seeking $475 million in damages. The lawsuit accused the network of defaming him by repeatedly describing his claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen as the “Big Lie,” a phrase historically associated with Nazi propaganda.
The complaint also alleged CNN damaged Trump’s reputation by allowing commentators and guests to compare him to Adolf Hitler and by using terms such as “racist,” “Russian lackey” and “insurrectionist” in its coverage.
In the Supreme Court filing, Trump’s attorney Alejandro Brito argued that the former president had been pursuing legitimate concerns about election irregularities following the 2020 election.
“In reality, President Trump was lawfully pursuing then-unresolved, and now proven, claims about election irregularities in the 2020 presidential election,” Brito wrote.
The case was dismissed in July 2023 by U.S. District Judge Raag Singhal, who concluded that CNN’s reporting and commentary were protected by the First Amendment and did not meet the legal standard for defamation.
While Singhal described some of the network’s statements as “repugnant,” he ruled they were “not, as a matter of law, defamatory.”
“This case involves political speech of the highest order,” Singhal wrote in his decision. “The First Amendment has its fullest and most urgent application precisely to the conduct of campaigns for public office.”
A federal appeals court upheld that ruling in November 2025. The three-judge panel included two judges appointed by Trump.
The planned appeal comes as Trump continues pursuing several other high-profile legal actions against news organizations. Since returning to the White House in January 2025, Trump has filed defamation lawsuits against The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the BBC, among others.
It also comes as CNN’s parent company, Warner Bros Discovery, is in the process of gaining regulatory approvals for its $110 billion acquisition by Paramount Skydance. The U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) are expected to approve certain, related portions of that transaction, which would effectively merge CNN with CBS News, among other assets.
The CNN case centers on longstanding legal questions surrounding the boundaries of protected political speech and the high standard public figures must meet to prevail in defamation cases. Under U.S. Supreme Court precedent, public officials and public figures generally must prove that allegedly defamatory statements were made with “actual malice,” meaning the publisher knew the statements were false or acted with reckless disregard for the truth.
